


From Home

by MaryPSue



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 11:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5783878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a place on the Chalk where the world went thin, once. A place that remembers how to be a doorway.</p><p>And where there is such a doorway, there is a witch to watch it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Home

The girl in the faded blue dress and enormous boots stares, arms crossed, unblinking.

The six-fingered man in the black coat stares back.

(And this is the Chalk, unscrolling around them, a sea of green so rich and bright that it almost hurts the eyes, with the tiny white flowers that spring from its rough soil slowly encroaching on the carvings as old as the hills and older, movement etched into solid earth. This is the Chalk in spring, when lambs like clouds on stilt legs drift across the slow roll of the land and the watery sunshine plays across the grass as though through water, when the wind off the downs still sometimes carries the faintest sharp scent of snow.

And this is circle time, when the walls between worlds are thin.)

“This is my home,” the girl says, at last. She says it simply, certainly, as though it were a matter beyond question.

(She hadn’t said anything when the man stepped onto the Chalk, through a gateway in the open air, a gateway that led nowhere but to more Chalk. She had only watched, with the still-chilly wind ruffling her brown hair and fluttering her carefully hand-hemmed skirt, the only parts of her that had moved. There was something in her expression, the man remembered thinking, that put him in mind of science fair - or perhaps county fair - judges, considering a verdict.

She couldn’t have been more than about twelve. She also couldn’t have seemed more perfectly at home on the Chalk if she’d tried, with her dress like a scrap of the sky blown down, her shoulders back and her feet swimming in the huge old boots but planted firmly, confidently, on her own ground.)

“I gathered,” the man says. There’s not much to be said in response to such a simple statement which somehow conveys so much of place, identity, ownership, even unspoken threat.

The girl’s eyes narrow.

Somewhere on the downs, a lamb bleats.

“I beat the Queen of the Fairies in her own land,” the girl says, at last. It’s not bragging, the man can tell, just a simple statement of facts. The clear implication is loud, echoing in the silence.

“I mean you no harm,” the man says, after some consideration. “It’s been a long time since I saw my home, and this is as near as I’ve been in -” He has to stop. There is no way to accurately track the time. He’s tried.

The girl’s stare softens, almost imperceptibly. She gives him another assessing look, tilting her head back and squinting in a way that might look more worldly and wise on someone with a few more years on their face.

“Were you very young?” she asks, at last, with one eye pressed nearly closed, the other dark as it peers up, and the man clenches all twelve of his fingers into fists. 

“Younger,” he admits.

“She stole our prince,” the girl says, understanding colouring her voice. “And my little brother.”

“The Queen of the Fairies?” the man asks. The girl nods. The sunlight shifts, dappling the mossy stone of the arch and making the lines of the Horse glow. “So you went to get him back.”

The girl nods again. “With the frying pan. It’s cast iron. They don’t like that. Too real.”

“And you didn’t even consider how hard it must be, how dangerous, to try to rescue your brother from another world? You didn’t worry that you might not know enough? Be strong enough?”

The girl puts her head to one side. Somewhere far overhead, a bird shrieks, its cry small and distant.

“He’s my brother,” she says, as though that’s all there is to it. “Even if he is always sticky.”

The man puts out a hand, steadies himself against one of the standing stones. The stone is rough under his palm, so used to glass and steel.

“What’s your name?” he asks, when he feels he’s regained his balance.

The girl wrinkles her nose. “I’m the witch.”

“Wise. You don’t want to give your true name to anything fey.” The man straightens up, dusting off his front. “May I impose on your hospitality a little longer? I’m afraid I’m very far from home.”

The girl taps her foot against the grass, the boot slopping clumsily around it. For a moment, her eyes fix on something by the man’s shoulder, but when he turns to look, there is nothing there. Just the faintest blur in the corner of his eye that might have been motion.

( _Them as looks to the edges_ , Mistress - no,  _Granny_  - Weatherwax had said. Life and death, love and hate, kindness and cruelty, justice and mercy…

… _here_  and  _there_.

 _Someone_  had to pay attention to what doorways they were opening.)

“Come by the dairy,” the girl - the witch - says, decisively. “I’m trying some new cheeses, and no one around here likes the Lancre Blue.”


End file.
